The creation and storage of digitized data has proliferated in recent years. Accordingly, techniques and mechanisms that facilitate efficient and cost effective storage of large amounts of digital data are common today. For example, a cluster network environment of nodes may be implemented as a data storage system to facilitate the creation, storage, retrieval, and/or processing of digital data. Such a data storage system may be implemented using a variety of storage architectures, such as a network-attached storage (NAS) environment, a storage area network (SAN), a direct-attached storage environment, and combinations thereof. The foregoing data storage systems may comprise one or more data storage devices configured to store digital data within data volumes.
Digital data stored by data storage systems may be frequently migrated within the data storage system and/or between data storage systems during normal operation. For example, when one or more users desire to access or download files, a portion or even the entire contents of a data volume may be sent across the network to be accessed by the user. In order to avoid poor user experience and other issues associated with latency in the data migration process of a particular data structure, some storage systems have begun implementing techniques to move data from one point in a network to a node which is closer to the edge of a network and proximate to the end user.
Typically, there are two considerations in serving data on an edge node of a network. One concerns providing and storing the data itself, and the other concerns providing the edge node with sufficient information such that the edge node may have knowledge regarding the contents and location of data in the storage network. In current systems, both considerations are accounted for using the same application layer protocol. In these systems, a content management system polls for changes in the storage system and pushes information regarding these changes to the edge nodes. A user accessing those changes may access the respective files using a web interface via a URL or similar addressing schema. Such systems cannot function in an object-space environment or by using a storage-layer protocol when accessing storage resources, such as a central storage repository, within the network.
Utilizing an application layer protocol to facilitate content management has further disadvantages in that it first requires a generation of a new protocol to obtain and manage information is generally administered within a storage network utilizing a different protocol. This causes inefficiencies because the new application-layer protocol must continuously poll for changes in the storage system when the storage system may already have mechanisms in place to track such changes.